Cluck You: Humans Must Answer Out Now

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This career affords me the option to write about space chickens more often than you’d think, but still not as much as I’d like. It’s a real shame, but this – this right now – is a most eggcellent moment. And getting to namedrop STALKER in the same article? Well that’s just the finger lickin’ chicken’s most prized pickins’ (I’m from Texas, so I’m allowed to talk like that). But yes: Humans Must Answer, a shmup by former STALKER devs where you play as genocidal intergalactic avians, is now officially out. There’s a celebratory trailer that tastes remarkably like chicken right after the break.

Why chickens? Why not. Here’s the tenderest yolk-y bits at the heart of Humans Must Answer:

“You play as the pilot on board a Scout ship called The Golden Eagle, which is manned by a crew of intelligent and dangerous chickens. After discovering the Solar System in which we humans reside, they attempt to establish contact but are surprised when the only answer is hostile!”

“So starts their explosive trip towards their goal, the Sun, along which they’ll meet the peculiarities of this bizarre future and show no mercy to the fleets of humans and robots that dare stand in their way.”

The action, meanwhile, focuses on evasion, upgrading, and interesting-looking weapon combinations – for example, the giant chain reaction shot demonstrated in the trailer. Also, secrets abound, and who doesn’t love secrets? What, some humans don’t? Oh, well then kill ’em all, I say.

Humans Must Answer is out on GOG right now. There’s also an old beta demo for the curious yet thrifty. So then, go! Make our insolent, warmongering race eggsplode into itsy, bitsy Humpty-Dumpty-sized pieces.

Great, I’ve been waiting for a true spritual successor to the STALKER series (because Metro, while cool, is decidedly different with it’s anti-science supernatural roots vs STALKER’s pseudoscience-based supernatural bullshit).

Bought this yesterday. The game starts out a little like Jets n’ Guns with a better UI and fewer weapon types, but the ability to spawn a side-ship turret (one can be out at a time) and the “support weapon” you get later for weapon combos really takes the gameplay in a new direction. The energy and ammo systems puts a limit on how abusable these abilities are, so I say the game’s been well-thought-out.

I’m playing on Hard, so I don’t know about Normal, but on Hard the difficulty is about comparable to Jets n Guns Gold (which is pretty hard). There are no mid-level checkpoints, but the levels themselves are generally short enough that you won’t need them, and I haven’t encountered an inescapable situation yet. That’s what the Special abilities are for: getting you out of the level’s trickiest situations.

Interesting that you can replay a previous level just for the “secret eggs”, and if you find them, they get added just like you had have found them in the first play. So, you can play a level just to find the “secret eggs” and ignore all the enemies, and again to blast all enemies for all “bonus eggs”.

I’m only on the 10th level of about (26, I heard?) and I just got to the point where I unlocked the support weapon for combos, so I have the feeling it’s going to get a lot harder, though it already was quite hard. I’ve already been through a few rage moments, another thing similar to JnG. I feel like it could use a lot more weapon types, but then again, a lot of the weapon types in JnG were fairly useless, and the support weapon unlocks new possibilities, so…

Qualitywise, I guess I’d say it’s like Jets n Guns before all the Gold edition additions, especially in the aspect that it’s best to reconfigure your ship between levels. Of course, you don’t know beforehand what works well, except for one instance where they tell you that you should probably bring a certain weapon, so there’s a puzzle aspect to it where you’re probably going to die pretty badly on the first couple runs of a level until you decide on a strategy (at least on Hard).

It’s half the price of JnG (1/3 the price on GOG for the launch week), so based on that, I’d quite recommend it. [On a side note, no Machinae Supremacy makes me sad, but their musician’s really good too.]

Tried the demo – I’m liking the concept but I have a few questions or concerns

1 – there’s a lot of “will I crash into that thing or not” scenery
2 – there’s some dodgy collisions with bullets (one killed whilst MILES away)
3 – the overall pace is dead, dead slow – add lack of savepoints and the ‘just one more go’ factor dimishes

The menus also animate so slowly – how massively stupid do you have to be to think “yeah, let’s make the menus take ages to appear – I mean the player is only WAITING”

Medium also seemed quite hard – I like that, except for the lack of savepoints making it a must to play on easy to work-out the patterns (it has a bit of a puzzle element in that respect) before you turn-up the music.

They do say the demo is an alpha – if they smooth over some stuff, speed-up the menus, make the controller work in the menus properly and tweak the collisions/make scenery obviously scenery, it would be quite nice.